Thinking About Picturebooks

1. Definitions

Taken from Reading Contemporary Picturebooks (2001) by David Lewis (see

resource list)

Barbara Bader: ‘A picturebook is text, illustrations, total design; an item of

manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historical document;
and. Foremost, an experience for a child. As an art form it hinges on
interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing
pages, and on the drama of the turning of the page. On its own terms its
possibilities are endless.’ (cited in Lewis, p.1).

Alan Ahlberg: ‘the big truth about picture books…is that they are an
interweaving of word and pictures. You don’t have to tell the story in the words.
You can come out of the words and into the pictures and you get this nice kind of
antiphonal fugue effect.’ (cited in Lewis, p.31.)

Margaret Meek: ‘pictures and words on the page interanimate each other.’ (cited
in Lewis, p.35)

Perry Nodelman: ‘the pictures themselves can imply narrative information only
in relationship to a verbal context; if none is actually provided, we tend to find
one in our memories.’ (cited in Lewis, p.35)

Perry Nodelman: ‘Words can make pictures into rich narrative resources – but
only because they communicate so differently from pictures that they change the
meaning of the pictures. For the same reason, also, pictures can change the
narrative thrust of words.’ (cited in Lewis, p.35)

Perry Nodelman: ‘good picture books as a whole are a richer experience than the
sum of their parts’. (cited in Lewis, p.36).

2. Terms for categorizing picturebooks

From Nikolajeva and Scott’s (2006) How Pictureboooks Work, pp. 1-26

o Symmetrical picturebook (two mutually redundant narratives) –

o Complementary picturebook (words and pictures filling each
other’s gaps)
o Expanding or Enhancing picturebook (visual narrative supports
verbal narrative, verbal narrative depends on visual narrative)
o Counterpointing picturebook (two mutually dependent narratives)
o Sylleptic picturebook (with or without words – two or more
narratives independent of each other)
3. Vocabulary from Judith Graham’s list: from her article in Modern
Children’s Literature: An Introduction, second edition– ‘Reading
Contemporary Picturebooks’ (2014), p.57

 Bleed
 Closure
 Double-page spread
 Endpapers
 Format
 Frame
 Gutter
 Page Opening
 Page Turn
 Peritext
 Pictorial/iconic sequence
 Recto
 Speech Bubble
 Tone
 Verso
 Viewpoint